Posts Tagged With: mummy

Joseph H. Hazleton was an errand boy at Ford’s Theater who knew John Wilkes Booth. He witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He also had some controversial opinions about the fate of Booth. He make some factual errors in his report. the story of Booths escape naturally are third hand but all that being said, the value of this video is hearing the voice of an eye witness to the assassination.

This Buddha statue was exhibited earlier this year in an exhibition in the Drents Museum (where it was shown for the first time outside China). The mummified body of the Buddhist master Liuquan, a monk who lived around the year 1100 and who belonged to the Chinese Meditation School, is hidden in this precious reliquary dating from the eleventh or twelfth century.

The statue was examined with a CT scan (photo by Jan van Esch)

In Amersfoort’s main hospital, Meander Medical Centre, the nearly thousand year old mummy has been recently examined with a CT scan and an endoscope. Several hospital employees helped with this unique project in their free time. A gastrointestinal and liver doctor took samples of yet unidentified material and examined the thoracic and abdominal cavities.

The hospital: “He made a spectacular discovery: at the place where once had been organs, he found, among all kinds of rotten material, paper scraps that were printed with ancient Chinese characters.”

(photo by Jan van Esch)

Also samples of bones were taken for DNA testing. The research will be published in a monograph that will appear about Master Liuquan. Meanwhile the mummy has been transported to Hungary where it will be on display in the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest until May 2015. –

Like this:

=============================================================================Ramesses III, Egypt’s last great pharaoh, had his throat slashed in a royal coup led by his son and one of his wives, according to new forensic analysis.

Computed tomography (CT) imaging revealed a serious wound in the throat of pharaoh’s mummy, just beneath the larynx.

Possibly caused by a sharp knife or a blade, the injury was about 2.75 inches wide and extended almost to the spine, cutting all the soft tissue on the front of the neck.

“Accordingly, all organs in this region, such as the trachea, oesophagus, and large blood vessels, were severed,” a team of Egyptian and European researchers led by Albert Zink, a paleopathologist at the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman of the European Academy of Bolzano in Italy, wrote in the current issue of the British Medical Journal.

“The extent and depth of the wound indicated that it could have caused the immediate death of Ramesses III,” they added.
The second Pharaoh of the 20th dynasty, Ramesses III ruled from about 1188 to 1155 B.C. He was the last significant king of the New Kingdom.

Ancient documents describe him as the “Great God” and a military leader who defended Egypt from repeated invasion of an ethnic group that the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples.

He was about 65 when he died, but the cause of his death has never been clear.
The researchers could see a Horus eye amulet embedded in Ramesses III’s wound. The charm symbolized royal power, protection, and good health.

“Most probably, the ancient Egyptian embalmers tried to restore the wound during mummification by inserting the amulet, generally used for healing purposes, and by covering the neck with a collar of thick linen layers,” the researchers said.
Ancient documents including the Judicial Papyrus of Turin clearly state that in 1155 B.C. members of Ramesses III’s harem attempted to murder him as part of a palace coup to change the line of succession.

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The discovery of the tomb Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun — commonly known as King Tut — caused a worldwide sensation in 1922, sparking interest in Egyptology. King Tut died in 1323 BCE, and his remarkably intact tomb was opened by archaeologist Howard Carter.
On Nov. 4, 1922, Carter found the first signs of what proved to be Tutankhamen’s tomb. But it was not until Nov. 26, after days spent clearing a passage down a long, steep stairway, that he and Lord Carnarvon reached a second sealed doorway, behind which were hidden treasures of the boy king’s last resting place.
On Feb. 16, 1923, after three months of removing the treasures, Carter was at last able to unseal the door of the burial chamber, revealing King Tut’s solid gold coffin and mummified remains.
The most stunning find was a stone sarcophagus containing three coffins nested within each other. Inside the final coffin, made of solid gold, was the mummified body of Tutankhamen, preserved for 3,200 years.

=========================================================================She’s one of the world’s best-preserved bodies: Rosalia Lombardo, a two-year-old Sicilian girl who died of pneumonia in 1920. “Sleeping Beauty,” as she’s known, appears to be merely dozing beneath the glass front of her coffin in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy.
Now an Italian biological anthropologist, Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, has discovered the secret formula that preserved Rosalia’s body so well.
Piombino-Mascali tracked down living relatives of Alfredo Salafia, a Sicilian taxidermist and embalmer who died in 1933. A search of Salafia’s papers revealed a handwritten memoir in which he recorded the chemicals he injected into Rosalia’s body: formalin, zinc salts, alcohol, salicylic acid, and glycerin.

Formalin, now widely used by embalmers, is a mixture of formaldehyde and water that kills bacteria. Salafia was one of the first to use this for embalming bodies. Alcohol, along with the arid conditions in the catacombs, would have dried Rosalia’s body and allowed it to mummify. Glycerin would have kept her body from drying out too much, and salicylic acid would have prevented the growth of fungi.

But it was the zinc salts, according to Melissa Johnson Williams, executive director of the American Society of Embalmers, that were most responsible for Rosalia’s amazing state of preservation. Zinc, which is no longer used by embalmers in the United States, petrified Rosalia’s body.

“[Zinc] gave her rigidity,” Williams said. “You could take her out of the casket prop her up, and she would stand by herself.”